Downtempo from Federico Ferrandina

Italian music artist Federico Ferrandina wears the hat of composer, songwriter, guitarist and record producer. Born in a family of classical musicians, such a heritage always got paired with an irrepressible hunger for non-classical musical galaxies and for non-musical disciplines like literature, modern dance and sociology.

This wide constellation shaped his unique and yet multi-layered grammar of sound, where classical instruments are surrounded by a contemporary arsenal of synthesisers, drones and drum machines with the light touch of contrapuntal writing and tridimensional harmonies.

He’s been able to team up with artists of all kinds (pop songwriters, jazz big bands, electronic music producers, rock bands, rappers, choreographers and filmmakers). His production gained attention in the entertainment industry, and many of his works are currently part of some of the major movies and TV shows soundtracks, such as the multi-Oscar winner Dallas Buyers Club or productions for Netflix and HBO series.

In 2017 he founded a strings orchestra in his hometown Matera, which records and performs original music in an ancient theatre carved in the stone and acoustically treated in order to get recordings that sound like nothing else. He just released his first solo album for French label Another Music Records, an unconventional and genre-defining work that displays his musical language and his forward-thinking conceptions of sound.

Now, he brings us his new release, the track “mesomerism”. Crafting a deeply atmospheric sound of dark ambient textures, the artist delivers a cinematic sonic world full of bass-driven synths and sparse percussion shots.

In Chemistry, mesomerism is a property of some molecules of having a structure that cannot be represented by a single structural formula; it’s also known as “resonance”. Their hybrid nature resembles this music, where a synth stained beat catches energy by a mediterranean guitar arpeggio, with random street voices punctuating the culminating moments.

Commenting on the track, he offers, “I’ve been obsessively traveling back and forth from Los Angeles where I work as film composer and caught inspiration in those large and warm highways, in those coffee shops and bicycle rentals. Hollywood sounds far, the ocean and beaches sound far too, it’s the urban unsettlement that gave inspiration to this track, like a metropolis built where once was a desert.”

Listen to mesomerism below

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